Review: LONGLEGS

After an intensely creepy prologue shown in rounded 4X3 we meet Lee Harker, young FBI agent at a briefing. She is burdened by something and seems barely there. When she and her partner hit the road for a doorknock she reveals an intuition the house they're looking for which proves true. A brief testing scene later and she is considered gifted and put on the case of a serial killer who appears to be manipulating his victims to do his work. Lee feels an increasing connection with the killer. The two are bound to meet but what happens when they do is less and less certain.

Osgood Perkins (aka Oz Perkins) has a famous father but on the strength of his directorial outings you wouldn't bother calling him a nepo baby. His previous rap sheet includes The Blackcoat's Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House which approach the horror genre through its more disturbing entry points. Not one for jumpscares, Perkins focuses on malaise and disintegrating order to reveal the horror of his situations. So, when he was attached to a serial killer story I was curious.

Serial killer movies ruled the '90s. Like any fad sub-genre, the gems gleam out from a mass of mediocrity in which a frenzies copying renders all pretenders indistinguishable from each other. In quest of ever more disgusting M.O.s and elaborate murder setups the movies spewed out racing from stories where we might question ourselves to gore fests with baddies who killed people we also wanted killed and themselves were dispatched with enough time for us to side with the good guys. It was a sleazy and self-destructive strain. (For the record my personal favourites (however generic they were) are Seven, The Ugly and pretty much none of the others.) Audiences had tired of them by the early '00s and they faded. So, what was left for a serial killer movie to say in 2024?

Well, first, most of the generic traits are omitted. Maika Monroe's Lee gives us a steadily haunted agent who might well be drifting away from the hard reality she needs to do her job. We don't get the frequently used countdown to climax of these films which only adds to the unease; it's just going to go on with little reward or justice if it ends. My own take, which is spoiler-free, is that this is a fable about domestic violence and the spectre of its victims and the blame they often suffer. While this is not grandstanded, the grinding darkness of the influence of the titular character made me think of figures currently in our ether, preaching the ideation of control. The sickness that we feel in the muted pallet and slow-fuse story is that of our own screen life and its compulsions.

This film is not for everybody. Anyone expecting an upgrade on Silence of the Lambs will feel short changed. As Blackcoat's Daughter used demonic possession to examine depression and Pretty Thing to talk about isolation, here his funereal tone bids us heed our own news services. Apart from a late exposition dump scene that robs the climax of some of its power, there's really not a wrong footed moment, here. But its insistence on melancholy and the bottling of grief are not the stuff of The Bone Collector or Kiss the Girls. The film is poignantly set in the heyday of serial killer fiction while pushing the worst aspects of the genre to one side.

As said, Maika Monroe carries the film with a deep, studied burden and is only making herself essential to the genre and beyond. Much has been made of Nicholas Cage's over the top performance but it didn't strike me as such. Cage has done a lot of fan service recently, showing how aware and accepting he is of his own kitsch (while humbly dazzling us with the likes of Pig). Here, he is beyond control but uses his silences between the storms to suggest his power. Someone few are making a fuss about is Alicia Witt who is consistently icky as Lee's mother; a thankless role but a committed performance.

Hype is a deadly weapon and can sink a movie through the disappointment it generates in audiences. Longlegs has been served by a trailer campaign that suggests its a blood spattered action crime thriller but it really doesn't play that way. It reminded me of how inaccurate the trailers were for The Babadook, promising a creature feature rather than a dark fable. The pity of it, here, is that the film might well sink from its perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes toward the lowest percentile all because it was oversold. It is not a gorefest nor is it a contest of good and evil. It doesn't have to be the scariest film of the year. It is quiet but resonant which is the best that should be said of a serial killer film so out of its time.